Based on a 90s cult comic released in 2001, it was an eerily prescient look into the future, foretelling the rise of hipster culture and beautifully encapsulating the struggle of twenty-something Millennials in the 2010s before that struggle had ever begun. It’s a coming of age story focalized through two teenage girls that don't have sexual awakening at its’ center. It’s a movie that, like people, goes through cycles, and those who’ve loved it at one point in their lives may find that it gains and loses and regains relevance as they age, change, and grow.

In a way, the career of John Waters reflects the evolution of exploitation cinema itself. Starting out in the 1960s with black-and-white microbudget shorts that didn’t so much have narratives as they were a series of shocking, hallucinogenic set pieces, he moved on in the early 1970s to more coherent feature films that were still more shock than substance. In the latter part of the decade and early 80s, he reached a comfortable midpoint, releasing pictures that still retained a certain grindhouse quality while focusing more on conventional storytelling.

I’ve been pretty quiet about The Autopsy of Jane Doe until now, and, I’ve got to admit, the reason is a bit odd.I was actually one of the first people to see the film, sitting literally front-and-center at its’ Fantastic Fest premiere in Austin last year. I’d received some press releases about it in the lead up to the festival, and they’d piqued my interest—a movie set in one location, built around an autopsy, starring Brian Cox?

Robocop is undeniably one of the quintessential 80s films, a cinematic classic that stands not only as a timelessly enjoyable piece of sci-fi/action but a timely critique of the culture from which it emerged. Though it was only the second American feature from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, he’d already gotten his thumb firmly on the pulse of a nation bursting at the seams with prosperity whilst simultaneously ridden with crime, a glitzy age whose neon aesthetics hid an underbelly of dank corruption and crippling selfishness. With its’ intersection of drug lords and evil businessmen, love/hate relationship with technology, pulsing discos and intrusive commercials, Robocop got the darker aspects of the 80s, in a way that other similarly executed films were able to wrap themselves around the era’s virtues.

As I’m writing this, countless fans the world over are going to say goodbye to the original X-Men Franchise with Logan, the story of Wolverine’s trek across America with a young mutant girl capable of great destruction. While it’s a fantastic film, and one that every superhero fan should definitely see, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Logan is, in fact, the latest installment in a minor subgenre of sci-fi action films that’s slowly been trickling back to life: people-on-the-run-with-a-super-child. In addition to Logan, we saw it only recently with Midnight Special, which saw Joel Edgerton and Michael Shannon attempting to transport a psychic child to a special destination in Florida; and last year’s Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things was entirely built around this archetype, with the usual adult protector role switched out for the D&D boys.

With the frequency with which Hollywood productions change or fall apart, the history of the industry is littered with “what ifs” and “almosts.” We’ll never get to see what would’ve happened had Alejandro Jodorowsky directed Dune; we’ll probably never see the result of Orson Welles filming Charles Williams’ Dead Calm. On the other hand, there are productions which do see it to fruition that are so out of the ordinary for their creators, or so far removed from any other films out there, that they function as the fulfilment of certain what-if scenarios without even involving any of the parties in question.